I built a new system last August, with a 1.4 Ghz Athlon, Epox 8KHA mobo, 256mb DDR, Geforce2 GTS, 20Gb ATA100 HD, and an Iomega 8x4x32 CDRW and DVDROM as 2nd channel master and slave, respectively. It is running Win98 fe.

The system ran flawlessly for two months. Then I started having random freezing, which required a reset to fix. Sometimes it would freeze right after booting, sometimes it would run for hours before freezing.

I tried all the usual fixes: checked for overheating, disabled all startup programs, changed video drivers, etc, but it didn't help. Finally, during one restart I noticed that the 2nd IDE channel devices weren't being found. So I did some experimenting:
  • Made DVD the master and CDRW the slave: system froze.
  • Made CDRW the only device on the 2nd channel: system froze.
  • Made DVD the only device on the 2nd channel: No freezing!

Aha, I thought, I have a bad CDRW. So I called the good folks at Iomega, and they kindly agreed to replace my drive under warranty. For the two weeks that the CDRW was removed, the system ran perfectly again. Yesterday I got the replacement CDRW, and plugged it in (as master, with DVD as slave.) It worked great until today - yep, the freezing is back!
So now what? Could I possibly have a bad IDE controller on the mobo? Or what do you all think?

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"I'm not a real doctor, I just play one on VDr!"